International Workshop, organized by the Institute of Iranian Studies (IFI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and Vienna Linguistic Society and the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
13.12-15.12.2016, Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences
LUCIS 7th Annual Conference: Memory and Commemoration in Islamic Central Asia
Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society
The seventh annual conference of LUCIS focuses on Islamic Central Asia, both from a historical and contemporary perspective. Central Asia today is often regarded as a periphery of the Islamic world, but this region with its fluid borders, stretching into present-day Afghanistan, Russia, China, Mongolia, Iran and the Caucasus, has been for a long period the cradle of empires that ruled over large parts of the globe.
Central Asia in the past has been at the heart of the trade network known as the Silk Road, a premodern highway of global interaction. The idea of a New Silk Road today demonstrates Central Asia’s increasing importance as a centre stage of geopolitical interests. Comprehending the complex history of Central Asia by taking into account its dynastic and regional historiographies and more recent nationalistic narratives is crucial for perceiving the current dynamics of this vast region.
Analysing commemorative practices across Central Asia may provide a prolific framework to outline the complexity of its group identities, in modern times often constructed as nationalistic narratives. In this conference we propose to focus on the notion of memory and commemoration in Central Asia from past and present perspectives, in a broad sense, in order to shed light on the complexities of this fascinating and understudied region.
Rather than focusing on a single period, medium or language of commemorative practices, the conference will take a comparative and connective perspective. Questions that may be addressed include:
The themes of the conference are broad on purpose, as we wish to welcome speakers from different disciplines and backgrounds.
Please find the full programme of the LUCIS annual conference here.
The Hidden Face of Surat: Exploring the History of a Cosmopolitan Centre, 1540-1750
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Distinguished Professor and Irving & Jean Stone Chair in Social Sciences, UCLA
The Second JESHO Lecture on Asian History, organised by Brill Academic Publishers and Institute of Iranian Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
03.11.2016, 18:00
Aula at the Campus (court 1.11), University of Vienna
Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien
The great port of Surat in western India dominated accounts of Indian Ocean trade between the late sixteenth and mid eighteenth century. Consolidated first by an Ottoman notable, it became the Mughal Empire’s western window into the worlds of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. In this lecture, I explore Surat’s other, less visible, aspect: namely as an intellectual centre, that brought together diverse and sometimes competing traditions. In turn, we shall see how this vibrant intellectual life was tied up both to certain structures of politics, and to commercial exchange at various scales.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Professor and Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA. He taught at Paris from 1995 to 2002 as Directeur d’études in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, holding a position on the economic and social history of early modern India and the Indian Ocean world. In 2002, Subrahmanyam was appointed as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford, a position he held for two years before moving to a chair in UCLA. From July 2005 to June 2011, he served as founding Director of UCLA’s Center for India and South Asia. In 2013, Sanjay Subrahmanyam was elected to a Chair in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France in Paris. He is the author of The Career and Legend of Vasco de Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Three Ways to be Alien: Travails and Encounters in Modern Eurasia (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2011; Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Convenor
Paolo Sartori, Institute of Iranian Studies, Editor–in-Chief of JESHO
Hollandstrasse 11−13, 1020 Vienna
T: +43 1 51581-6516
paolo.sartori@oeaw.ac.at
The Legacy of the Ancient Kings. Ctesiphon and the Persian Sources of Islamic Art15.11.2016 to 02.04.2017
Pergamonmuseum
How did Islamic cultures and Islamic art arise? Where do their roots lie? Like the Islamic religion itself, Islamic art also built on its predecessors in the Middle East. Focussing on Ctesiphon, a vast landscape of ruins south of Baghdad, this exhibition is devoted to the Persian legacy inherited by Islam.
Dominated by the monumental vaulted hall of the royal palace, the Taq-e Kesra, the city today is an emblem of the grandeur and downfall of the mighty Sassanid empire, a great power in ancient Persia about which little is known today. For centuries it competed with Rome and Byzantium. In the 7th century CE, however, the conquests by the Arab armies fundamentally changed the political balance of power. Culturally, too, a transformation took place – “Islamic art” was born. But had everything really changed?
The Oriental Institute and the Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, announce a conference to be held October 5-7, 2016.
The Limits of Empire in Afghanistan: Rule and Resistance in the Hindu Kush, circa 600 BCE-650 CE
In the first millennia BCE and CE, successive empires sought to incorporate the archipelago of territories in and around the Hindu Kush and to install their structures of rule. The Achaemenians, Seleucids, and Sasanians endeavored — and sometimes pretended — to rule regions of Afghanistan from their courts located in the Near Eastern core, upward of 2500 km distant. The Kushans, for their part, made Bactra and Begram the bases of an empire that extended far beyond into India and Central Asia. Apart from distance, these empires confronted a political geography in the Hindu Kush that was — like the Caucasus — uniquely unfavorable to imperial governance, as well as populations with disparate cultures, social structures, and political traditions. Afghanistan thus provides a test of the capacities of ancient imperial regimes to overcome distance, verticality, and difference to integrate territories into their trans-regional and trans-cultural orders. As even a passing familiarity with the history of the region suggests, efforts at empire failed at least as often as they succeeded in a geographical and cultural landscape highly conducive what James Scott calls the “art[s] of not being governed.” The conference aims to focus on the limits of empire in Afghanistan, as a means of better comprehending the workings of the regimes that laid claim to its territories and the responses of its populations.
The conference convenes archaeologists, art historians, historians, philologists, and numismatists to debate current research in the context of ongoing theoretical debates concerning the formation, endurance, and limits of imperial systems within a highland political ecology.
For a detailed programme and abstracts, see Symposium: The Limits of Empire in Afghanistan | The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Lecture and Book Presentation at Tehran University
The Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5 in Context
Department for Iranian Studies at the University of Tehran in cooperation with The Austrian Academy of Science (ÖAW) present:
Lecture : “The Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5 in Context”
By: Dr. Chiara Barbati (Institute of Iranistik, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Date: Wednesday, 5th October, 2016
Place: University of Tehran, Faculty of Literature, Kamal Hall (4th floor)
On the basis of a thorough philological-linguistic study, the book aims primarily at reintegrating the complex whole of the various phenomena that have contributed to creating what in modern scholarship runs under the name of Christian Sogdian Gospel Lectionary E5, a set of manuscript fragments preserved in the Turfan Collection in Berlin. The study applies a precise methodology that puts various disciplinary approaches on the same level in order to relate and interconnect textual, material and historical-cultural aspects. Specific codicological characteristics are considered in correlation with the broader manuscript tradition to which the fragments belong. The discussion of the Gospel lectionary leads to reflections on the transmission, reception and development of a specific body of religious knowledge, namely that of the Church of the East. The exploration of linguistic phenomena takes also into consideration the processes at work in the missionary history of the Church of the East in Central Asia between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the Oasis of Turfan in present-day Xinjiang, China. The book therefore addresses Iranologists as well as students of Eastern Christianity and of manuscript cultures.
Chiara Barbati (PhD 2009) is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Iranian studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). She specializes in Ancient and Middle Iranian languages. Her main fields of research are Sogdian language and literature with particular regard to the Christian Sogdian texts in relation to its Syriac sources, history of eastern Christianity through primary sources (Syriac) as well as secondary sources (Sogdian, Middle Persian, New Persian), paleography and codicology of pre-Islamic Iranian manuscripts and Iranian dialectology from an historical point of view.
Minorities and Majorities in the Middle East and Asia
In Memory of Rudolf Macúch (1919-1993)
The Department of Comparative Religion is honoured to invites to the conference titled “Minorities and Majorities in the Middle East and Asia” which will take place at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava on the days of 14th and 15th of September. The conference is dedicated to the memory of the world-renowned scholar Professor Rudolf Macúch. The talks cover different aspects of the religions and cultures of minorities, especially in today Iran and Iraq, from Mandaeans, Christians, Yezidis, Yārsān (Ahl-e Haq) and Sufīs to Buddhists, ect.
Organizers: Department of Comparative Religion, Comenius University in Bratislava
Slovak Association for the Study of Religions
Venue: Comenius University in Bratislava, Faculty of Arts, 2 Gondova St.
Conference programme (PDF):
Wednesday, 14th September 2016
PANEL 1: The Mandaeans of Iran
Thursday, 15th September 2016
PANEL 2: Diasporas
PANEL 3: Multiplied and fragmented minorities
PANEL 4: Minority policies
PANEL 5: Minorities and Religious Dogmatics
PANEL 7: Religious fractions and groups
PANEL 8: Minorities and majorities in literature & writing
The eleventh biennal conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies will take place in Vienna from 2 to 5 August 2016.
For more information on the conference, see this link. And here is the conference programme.
Iberia between Rome and Iran from Pompey to Heraclius
07.- 09. July 2016, University of Jena
An international colloquium on the history of Georgia in Late Antiquity (from the 1st century BC to the 7th century AD) organized by the Chair of Ancient History at the University of Jena.
Central to the research are the close contacts of the Iberians to the Roman Empire on one side, and to the realms of the Parthians and Sasanians on the other side. Iberia formed an interface between the great powers and was strongly influenced by both sides. Some of these influences, such as the establishment of Christianity, territorial ambitions of the great neighbors or linguistic developments, will be discussed at the conference, attended by German and internatioal scholars of the Ancient Studies and the history of Caucasian Iberia.
Programm
Sektion I – Iberien im Spannungsfeld der Großmächte
Sektion II – Zur Christianisierung Iberiens
Sektion III – Zur Religiosität der Iberer (Moderator: Udo Hartmann, Jena)
Sektion IV – Zu den Quellen
Sektion V – Archäologisches
Friedrich Carl Andreas:
ein Sohn der vier Himmelsrichtungen
A talk by Martin Tamcke
Thursday, July 7, 2016 at 19.00
Lepsiushaus Potsdam
A joint event organized by the Lepsiushauses Potsdam and the Theodor-Fontane-Archivs of the University Potsdam.
The Orientalist Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846-1930) is mostly known as husband of Lou Andreas-Salomé, a well-known German writer and psychoanalyst. He was born as a descendant of Armenian, Malay and German ancestors in Indonesia and grew up in Hamburg and Geneva. He studied Iranian and Oriental Studies (PhD, 1868 Erlangen) and participated as a volunteer in the Franco-German War. Between 1875 and 1881, he conducted field work in India with the Parsees and with a Prussian Research Expedition in southern Iran, where he remained for several years. His research in Europe focused on the languages and music of Ossetia and the Indo-Afghan borderlands. From 1903 to his death he was professor of western Asiatic and Iranian philology at the University of Göttingen. As a master of many living languages, Andreas specialized in the history of languages and civilizations, but his interests extended to philosophy and natural history. He excelled in reading difficult Oriental scripts, ancient or modern, and in perceiving the finest nuances of spoken languages, especially their accents. Together with his wife, a friend of Nietzsche and Freud, and Rilke, he travelled to Russia and visited Tolstoy. He was very active by the practical training of missionaries for Kurdistan and Central Asia and to the scientific analysis of texts and the religious movement of the Persian Bābīs. Working with the Manichean fragments from Turfan, he quickly isolated those texts written in Parthian (which he called the “northern dialect”) and identified another “Pahlavi dialect” as the Sogdian language.
Read more about him and his works here.